Abstract
The riddle inhabits the object. Once taken hold, it externalises itself upon the object, it folds itself around the object, and, like a behaviour-altering parasite, it gives the object new purpose, new function. Where inhabiting a work of art would, ultimately, reveal the object, the riddle confounds matters. It becomes the object’s reason-to-be. In the essay Lyric Substance: On Riddles, Materialism, and Poetic Obscurity (2001), Daniel Tiffany writes that riddle is a paradigmatic structure that at once conceals itself while exhorting the reader to give it a recognisable form – an identity. This is writing that positions itself within the work of art. It is therefore not only criticism, but philosophy, and visual artistic making also. It is writing about art, writing as art, and writing as a lens through which to look at art. 1 In order to examine such writing (such riddles) a plurality of voices is necessary. The core of the riddle cannot be determined by a sole author. The paradigm of the riddle is that it is Janus-faced: on one side, a calm and direct representation of its core; on the other, a wild and untamed tangle of concepts, each that has a beginning but perhaps no satisfactory conclusion.
In Interdisciplinary Encounters: Hidden and Visible Explorations of the Work of Adrian Rifkin, a collection of newly-commissioned essays edited by Dana Arnold, Professor of Architectural History and Theory at Middlesex University, eight writers respond to a preface by Rifkin that outlines some of his key theoretical standpoints. Each has subsequently written an essay of classical art history that engages with some of Rifkin’s own research interests. Therefore, the essays that comprise this anthology, naturally, share reference to or influence from Rifkin. However, his work and theory are constant references to themselves, their processes, and their development hitherto, which ultimately means that, for much of this book, Rifkin’s figure becomes something of a stalking horse, challenging the reader to recall, by turns, aspects of theories by the thinkers that have influenced him, including Aby Warburg, Edgar Wind, Erwin Panofsky and Jacques Rancière.
In his seminal work, The Eloquence of Symbols (1983), Edgar Wind makes the statement of Renaissance-era art patrons that:
Art was as indispensable to them as their daily food … They asserted their ‘will to believe’ at the crucial moment, when the outcome of an artistic experience was in the balance, whereas we prefer to wait until the artist has finished his work, so that we may decide whether we care for the outcome or not. (p. 94)
This idea of artistic process embodying aspects of the mysterious more succinctly than the finished work is a line of thinking that is uniquely endearing to scholars of classical art. The process of making is where poetry occurs. In the same essay, quoted by Rifkin in his preface text, Wind writes that: ‘In the centre of any good symbol there is an opaque core which will not yield to rational analysis, although around this core translucent images may be grouped which draw from it their strength and denseness’ (p. 6). We have to be careful here to not be drawn into superficiality but instead to focus on Wind’s core aim: that is, to examine the concept of the riddle.
And here we inadvertently stumble upon a Warburgian notion, when we recall that his library of 60,000 works was organised not alphabetically or according to subject but by ‘elective affinities’, the secret intimacies that Warburg himself intuited between its volumes (Frieze, 2004). Rifkin, and this book’s respondents, refer to the idea of methodology as a key analytical device; in particular, the concepts of parataxis and logocentrism. Ultimately, then, Rifkin’s concepts derive from a particular style of analysis, rather than a particular mode of analysis. The reader is given facts about Rifkin’s history, family, and study – particularly his education and teaching in Paris in the 1960s – and we very clearly understand how the process and outcome of these events formulated into coherent lines of philosophical enquiry.
The eight writers, whose essays comprise this anthology, appropriate Rifkin’s style, methodologies and object-oriented concerns to present intelligent and well-written analyses; Steve Edwards’ essay Décor and Decorum at the ‘Temple of Photography’, which takes as its case study Antoine Claudet’s Regent Street Daguerrotype Studio of the 1850s, is a particularly fascinating cultural archaeology that, by his own admission in postscript, could be extended into a larger, self-contained research. Similarly, David Peters Corbett’s essay American Water: Memory and Projection in Mid-Nineteenth Century American Painting screams for wide reception. Even casual art historians would recognise the consistently confident propositions of Griselda Pollock and Jaś Elsner, both of whom contribute essays that maintain and expand upon the editorial ambitions of this collection. Rifkin’s preface and afterword provide neat bookends to the major themes and conceptual boundaries that the essays explore. There are no major concerns to which Rifkin’s idiosyncratic approach to criticism cannot be applied as critical methodology.
Except, of course, the question is whether it is idiosyncratic to Rifkin. More than four decades as a researcher, writer and educator naturally means that his approach must be strong enough to support and continually expand upon emerging research – both his own and others. But this act of iconography feels excessive. There is a problem with this kind of reconsideration: why not go straight to the source and revisit Rifkin’s original works? In her essay Fragment and Repetition in Ingres: The Never-Ending Work of Art (2015), Susan L Siegfried quotes Rifkin’s 1999 study Ingres Then, and Now. This is a book about rewriting as if it were a desirable achievement (p. 127). In a later passage, she gives an insightful suggestion that could be used as prismatic to examine the purpose of this book. She writes that:
Rifkin was even more deeply fascinated by words and the semiotics of language than he was by works of art: he wrote wonderfully about Ingres’s notebooks, about the look of words on their pages and the relation of those words to the textual sources they copied and referenced. (p. 128)
The quality of writing throughout this collection is strong and the application of theory to artworks and concepts is well informed; however, this attempt at canonising a form of enquiry feels at odds with liberal communal pedagogy (that we’re informed about Rifkin’s development as an educator). This book reads well enough that it could service an audience within a number of different fields, perhaps the most apparent being popular psychology. But as Rifkin’s work intimates throughout, a key strength of critical engagement with visual art practice is that it is able to comfortably incorporate a wide spectrum of ideas, and while its ideas are enthusiastic and wide-ranging, due to its specific reliance on interdisciplinarity, it’s difficult to identify a field where this book might sit - other than the visual arts itself.